We can now understand how monkey mind creates monkeytraps.
It does it by seeding our consciousness with worst-case scenarios, watering those seeds with anxiety, then searching frantically for solutions to these imaginary problems.
It creates a frightening fantasy world, and then struggles to control the people, places and things that inhabit that world.
Monkey mind is all about bringing scary stuff under control.
Remember the laundry list I mentioned earlier? Those thirteen symptoms common to untreated adult children?
We can see it, now, as nothing more than one monkeytrap after another.
Let’s take a deeper look at the internal dynamics behind that list.
If so, what you experienced was the normal state of this anxious brain we inherited.
It’s that ceaseless river of thoughts and feelings, fears and fantasies Buddhists call monkey mind.
Research suggests we have more than 6,000 thoughts per day, many of them clustered around the same topics.
Think of each thought as a branch on a tree, and the mind swinging from thought to thought, minute by minute, hour by hour, all day long.
What if I get sick? Will I have enough money? Is my boss mad at me? Is my boyfriend cheating on me? Do I look fat in these clothes? Did my joke offend someone? What does X think of me? Are they talking about me behind my back? What if my tire blows on the expressway? What is X gets reelected? Did I turn off the stove?
If you have a normal human mind you know exactly what I mean.
Being caught up in this flood of paranoid chatter is enormously stressful. It keeps us anxious, tense, on guard, and exhausted.
That’s because most of the time we’re unable to remember that These are just thoughts.
We respond to them, emotionally and physically, as if they were events in the real world.
It’s like watching a horror film and forgetting it’s just a movie.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca said,
We suffer more from imagination than from reality.
Psychologist Eric Maisel writes,
We are not mad, most of us, but our minds nevertheless resemble lunatic asylums. It is real bedlam in there.
And from novelist Leni Zumas:
Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances, future and past.
They are all describing monkey mind.
So was Mark Twain when he wrote,
I’ve lived through some terrible things, some of which actually happened.
Why do human beings end up chasing control when what we really need is power?
Yes, the socialization process and family conditioning drive us into compulsive controlling.
But our conditioning did not start there.
It began millennia ago, when we were an at-risk species struggling to stay alive in a hostile environment, and control-seeking was essential to our survival.
Psychologist Rick Hanson offers a description of how this happened.
“Imagine,” he writes, “some of our earliest mammal ancestors, little rodent-like creatures scurrying about in the shadows of the last dinosaurs.”
The ones that became absorbed in the pleasant sensations of a good meal, warm rocks, and sweet-smelling flowers CRUNCH got eaten because they missed the sound of a slither nearby.
The ones that lived to pass on their genes were nervous and jumpy, quick to notice potential threats and to remember painful experiences.
That same circuitry is active in your brain today in the amygdala, hippocampus, and related structures.
It’s hard-wired to scan for the bad, and when it inevitably finds negative things, they’re both stored immediately plus made available for rapid recall.
In contrast, positive experiences… are usually registered through standard memory systems, and thus need to be held in conscious awareness 10 to 20 seconds for them to really sink in.
In sum, your brain is like velcro for negative experiences and teflon for positive ones.
We are descendents of the “nervous and jumpy” ones that lived, the ones that emerged from this dangerous prehistory both gifted and burdened with a brain whose normal state is essentially paranoid – a brain which constantly remembers old threats and anticipates new ones, an anxious brain obsessed with defending us against potentially dangerous people, place and things.
We are, as Hanson says, hard-wired to scan for the bad.
As both a therapist and recovering control addict I’ve learned two more important differences between control and power.
The first of these differences lies in where they focus their attention:
Control focuses outward, while power focuses inward.
What’s that mean?
It means that control focuses on the environment, on other people, places and things.
But power focuses, not on the environment, but on how I react to it — on my own thoughts, feelings and needs.
The more controlling I am, the more preoccupied I become with what’s happening around me, and the more I lose touch with myself.
Becoming powerful, though, is all about listening to the self, and learning to understand and accept what I hear.
So where control addiction pulls me into a hypervigilant war with external reality, developing personal power leads to growing self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-care.
